


o! arcadia

by Askance, octopifer



Category: The Sisters Brothers (2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Implied Sexual Content, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 18:28:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17513684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance, https://archiveofourown.org/users/octopifer/pseuds/octopifer
Summary: There is gold here, Morris writes.He has already confirmed it—now it is a matter of the science working in our favor. I can think of no more pleasant partner to do hard work with. The labor we do is difficult, but he never shirks it; when we are working, he never complains; and if he complains it is with a smile. I find myself thinking often about holding him close to me.





	o! arcadia

**Author's Note:**

> Collaboration with [Tania](https://twitter.com/nobledemonsxo), whose beautiful art is below! Happy Amazon Prime Premiere Day!

_We have risen,_ Morris writes, _and are anticipating the end of the work today, well ahead of schedule: the dam is nearly built and only needs time to settle. In the meantime I suppose we will make ready our equipment for tomorrow night and discuss our strategies for collecting the gold and making it secure, as well as to what location to move next—how to do so and avoid the Sisters brothers, where on the river to set up camp, how best to move our belongings—et cetera._

_Hermann is in the process of waking, which takes several minutes and no small amount of willpower, it seems. He enjoys his sleep and sleeps so deeply that it is difficult to rouse him in the night. I have tried. He has every right to be tired; I am tired, too. But it is a good and healthy exhaustion, the satisfying kind._

Across the smoldering remains of last night’s campfire he watches Warm work himself awake, making soft, difficult noises and stretching out underneath the horse blanket beneath which he’d fallen asleep the night before. The sun is barely up above the horizon and everything is a hazy blue, the blue of drifting smoke and dawn light, and flies and buzzing insects beginning to wake and circle, the horses and donkeys shuffling peacefully near the trees, the river, down below the bluff, murmuring across the rocks.

“Good morning,” says Morris, and Warm mumbles the same back to him, still trying fitfully to escape his sleep. He sits up and blinks around, covers his mouth with one hand to yawn, and Morris smiles.

“Coffee?” It’s boiling on what’s left of the fire, and Morris nudges a loose twig into the embers with his boot. It flares bright orange and then succumbs to grey ash.

“Please,” says Warm, and yawns again as Morris ladles it out of the pot and into Warm’s tin mug and hands it to him. He sits cross-legged facing the fire with the mug held between his hands, breathing the steam, his eyelids slipping.

Morris rests his own cup on the log beside him and picks up his pencil again, and he feels Warm watching him while he finishes his entry for the morning, in neat cursive as consistent and legible as typeface.

_I expect that today will be a long but pleasant day, as most days have been in Hermann Warm’s company. If all my days could be as content and productive I would die a happy man at the end of them._

 

 

* * *

 

After breakfast—bacon and more coffee for Morris, biscuits for Warm—Warm gets up and wanders into his tent, presumably to change his clothes, and Morris watches him disappear behind the canvas flap and tie it closed, and settles into the early morning quiet for a moment.

Warm could not have picked a more beautiful claim, he thinks, nor one so suited to Morris’ particular tastes, if he had tried. From their campsite he can just see the river, a curling, silvery ribbon, through the tumbling pines and cliffside rocks, and the mountain face that rises on its opposite bank is sheer and white and sparkles in the sun, its wrinkles and fissures dark and cool-seeming. And it goes on forever to the west beyond them, swallowing up the river around its curve, studded with skeletal trees that whisper and sway in the wind, bright in the cold morning sun. Alone in their clearing, with no human noise to be heard, Morris thinks he could sit perfectly still forever, until he turned to stone and was indistinguishable from the place itself.

“What to do today?” he calls, toward the tent, breaking the stillness.

He hears Warm hum a note in thought, and then he pulls back the tent flap and steps out, rolling up his shirtsleeves to rest above his elbows. “We should check on the dam. I think it should be high enough, but we shouldn’t take the risk.” He looks up, through the tree canopy, at the thin, whispy grey clouds scudding by overhead. “If it rains we’ll have that to deal with.”

Morris follows his gaze. The air is too heavy and the sky too light for it, he thinks. So he says, “I don’t think it will rain.”

“You’re probably right.” Warm sits down heavily on the log across the fire to lace up his boots with his deft, dark fingers, and Morris watches them work with fondness. It is something he has been feeling in waves, lately. Since Jacksonville, really, since it became clear that they were partners and would continue forth as such. “And then—well, we should prepare to move. We won’t want to linger once we’ve prospected tomorrow. Would you be comfortable leaving at night?”

“As long as we have light to guide the animals by.”

Warm nods, and finishes lacing his boots, and stands. He leans down to pick a lingering bit of biscuit out of the skillet and glances at Morris, the _are you ready?_ look, and together they begin to make their way toward the cliff.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Morris says, waiting at the height of the bluff for Warm to find the narrow path down.

“Yes?”

“Well, you’ve talked a great deal about what you hope to build in Dallas.”

“Yes.” Warm takes hold of a bent sapling for stability as he steps down off the bluff, onto the red-dirt trail a foot’s width across that winds down to the riverbank.

“You haven’t said much about what you yourself hope to do there. With your time, that is.”

Warm doesn’t say anything about that; he’s focused on not slipping off the cliffside. He makes his way with one hand along the wall of the bluff, one foot in front of the other, and Morris follows in contented silence, descending cautiously toward that silver ribbon and the semicircular stone dam they’ve fit together across its breadth.

“I suppose it slipped my mind,” Warm says, finally, once they’ve reached the shore and can stand on solid ground again. The sand here is solid and compact and glints of mica shimmer in it, in the bootprints they leave behind.

“It would be prudent to think about it,” says Morris. “Don’t you agree?”

“Oh, I do.” The dam is close, only a few hundred yards upriver from where they’ve descended. Down here, below the cliff, the quickening heat of day is tempered, and mosquitos are humming fitfully in the pools of stagnant water in the rock underneath. “I think about it all the time.”

“Where you’ll live, for example.”

“I’ve thought of that,” Warm says. “I reckon that our company has to have a headquarters. I see no reason we couldn’t live there.”

Morris pauses for just a moment in the sand, and Warm does, too, to bend down and undo all the work he had just done on his boot laces. He had quietly assumed, of course, that they would live together, but he hadn’t known Warm was thinking the same thing. He’s naturally come to like the idea, after so many weeks on the trails with him, and how easy it has been, how little tension there has been, how little conflict. It’s as if they’ve known one another forever, have been traveling for decades side by side, and Morris is not sure how to say those kinds of things, so he simply hasn’t.

Warm’s boots come off, and he rolls up his trouser legs and sets off calmly into the water, wading noisily toward their dam.

Morris follows a moment later, and quietly begins to search through the clear, rolling current for stones the right shape and size to bulk up the top of the structure.

Warm has his hands on his hips and is examining the dam with his scientific eye, and as he squints in the sun and bends this way and that to inspect it, he keeps talking, a little louder now, over the current.

“It wouldn’t have to be a large house,” he says, and Morris hauls up a rock and makes his slow, staggering way over to him. He hefts it up onto the top of the dam, turns and shifts it into place. “Two rooms, maybe? With a walkway in between. Covered, of course. One room to sleep in—one to do business in, eat, spend time. I think we could do well for ourselves in a house like that.”

He steps back, away from his critical gaze, and begins searching for stones alongside Morris.

“Don’t you think? And a stable, for the horses, of course—just a small one, a lean-to. A garden. I don’t know yet what grows well in Dallas. We’ll find that out, I’m sure.”

_We._ He says it as if it were determined from the beginning, and Morris resolves to go along with it, not to mention it. He is proud, in a way, that they have had the same idea.

“Two rooms will be enough for us, do you think?”

Warm shrugs. He looses a stone from the riverbank with the mighty noise of the mud sucking after it and thrusts it up to rest with its brethren on the dam. It’s almost at his eye level, now—an impressive thing, for two men in two days.

“I don’t see why not. A second story would be—too much, I think.”

“Yes.”

“And there will be open space, outside, to move around in. There’s a great deal of land, in Dallas.”

They fall into the rhythm of work, then, and Morris indulges in thinking about it, every time Warm’s arms swing up next to him with a stone clasped in their hands, when the sweat begins to collect along the back seam of Warm’s shirt and drip down into Morris’ eyes. The sun is bearing hard now, but the water is cool, almost cold, and he imagines the vast stretch of plainland that they will own, or share with others, and the long, squat house of greyish wood, how it might sink a bit in the middle, and its greased paper windows, and its two beds in the right-hand room, and a stool by the fireplace and a potbelly stove for the winter cold. How cold does it get, he wonders, in Dallas? In such close quarters, he supposes it won’t matter. There will be quilts. And if it snows there will be miles, acres to look out on, bare black trees, and a distant dirt track leading off to other houses, to buildings where the community gathers, and off even further, into the flat prairie, a million directions in which to wander and be quiet.

“I like it,” Morris says, feeling a prickle of something in his breast, and Warm grins with his brilliant teeth.

 

* * *

 

 

              Warm talks all the way through the work until the dam is finished, and Morris listens, only occasionally offering a nod or a word in response when Warm pauses for conversation. He talks about road-building and beekeeping and barn-raising and animal husbandry, clothes-making and bread-baking and ranching. Morris has grown used to his chatter over their time together; when Warm finds a train of thought he follows it on all its meandering ways until he simply runs out of things to say. Morris loves this about him. He had not realized how worn out he was, of an adulthood of hardy, taciturn men and the rough silence of the road, until he had someone who could fill that silence.

              Their trousers are wet to the thigh now, and Morris watches Warm haul himself up out of the water onto the top of the dam, where he finds his precarious balance and then stands, hands on his hips, like a proud surveyor of a new land. He grins down at Morris— _look what we made_!—and Morris smiles back. It is a diamond of a moment, the kind that Morris knows he’ll remember for a long time: Warm’s dark skin and wet clothes and his white smile under that brushy moustache, and his hair setting with sweat and river-water in darling curlicues across his forehead.

If he hadn’t listened to his heart and his gut and fled Jacksonville with Warm, if he’d turned him over in that dark, musty shed, where would they be now? Warm would be dead, painfully and awfully so, having suffered for hours beforehand; Morris has nightmares about it, sometimes, because Warm is not a tough or stoic man. He would have wept and begged and screamed. Would have screamed for Morris, maybe. He dreams that sometimes and wakes in a sweat, and leaves his tent to peer into his companion’s to be sure he is still there, safe and sound and breathing gently. Afterward he checks his gun twice before he lies back down to sleep again.

              And Morris, having turned down an opportunity for peace and community and the lifelong friendship of an extraordinary man, would have been back in Oregon City, waiting for orders, indescribably alone.

              Instead—miraculously—he is here near Folsom Lake, and has built a dam with his own two hands, and save the distant threat of the Sisters brothers and anyone else who might be after them, there is not a trouble in the world to be found here.

              He reaches up and Warm takes his arm to come down off the dam, splashing loudly back into the mud, and he holds Morris’ wrist for a moment as he leans down to straighten out a leg of his trousers. When he comes back up he looks downriver, toward a gentle fall in its current over a hump of rock.

              “I think I’ll wash off,” he says, “and then go up for something to eat.”

              “Alright,” says Morris. Warm takes his hand away and Morris is sad for it.

              “Join me?”

              He wants to. “In a moment,” he says, glancing back up the bluff, to where their campsite is hidden by the trees. “I need to get fresh clothes.”

              Warm smiles, and brushes a mosquito from Morris’ collar, and then begins to wade toward the tiny falls.

 

* * *

 

 

              Two men traveling together under scarce conditions will by necessity see one another half or fully naked at one point or another, and Morris and Warm have been no exception. Once or twice in passing the not-quite-tied-off flap of Warm’s tent Morris has seen a glimpse of skin or the angle of a hip, and Warm himself has seen him in every state of undress, bathing in still mountain ponds or hanging his clothes up to dry on tree branches overnight. Morris has carefully kept his private thoughts about Warm’s body to himself, reflecting on them in his own time. He sees no reason to examine them too closely. He has always been pragmatic toward his own emotions—would rather contemplate them, and then accept them, than question or fight them.

              At the campsite he looks in vain for something halfway clean and settles for a shirt he draped over a bush last week to dry; it is stained with little spots of leaf-green, and faint yellow where his sweat had gathered, but is otherwise cool and relatively fresh. And he may as well let his trousers dry in the sun by the river. He folds the shirt under his arm and begins to start back.

              Warm is a soft brown smudge in the water from so high up, and Morris glances at him every now and then as he descends back down the bluff, one foot in front of the other, his hand skidding across the bare-faced rock and the lichen that clings to it. When he gets to the riverbank, he sees that Warm’s long underwear is bunched down around his hips, and its sleeves are trailing ridiculously in the current behind him, like thin, frantic grey arms. He crouches down and disappears up to his chin in the water, treading contentedly in slow circles.

              Morris considers ducking down behind a rock for modesty, but decides against it; Warm isn’t paying attention, anyway. He’s lazily fighting the current that is trying to push him downriver, doing awkward balletic skips backward off the muddy riverbed.

              He lays his things out on a boulder that is already baking warm in the sunlight; a tiny lizard skitters away from beneath his hand, and Morris takes a few steps into the water. It’s cold, and he submerges himself as quickly as he can, to get over the shock of it, and when he pops his head back up Warm is still drifting in circles a little ways away, his eyes closed, basking in the heat.

              Morris finds balance on his knees, wiping his wet hair out of his eyes, and begins to scrub the dust and sweat and sand from his skin, watching his freckles and moles reappear from beneath the grime, his fingernails turning clean and pink though still rimed with dirt. He drifts in his own slow circles in Warm’s direction, and sees him standing up in the water again, shaking it out of his eyes.

              Sometimes they talk for hours, but sometimes they exist in complete and companionable silence—this is one of those times. There is nothing to talk about, and besides, there is so much to look at and take in, in quiet: the silver current, the tall mountain face, the wind in the trees, and Warm, lean and muscled, testing his luck on the rocks that line the falls, climbing up onto their slippery surfaces to stand and gaze west.

              There is a river like this one in Dallas, Morris knows, though not nearly so wild and grand—just the Trinity River, flowing southeast. Morris wonders how close to it they’ll build their homestead, and if they’ll go there, explore its shores and fish from its tributaries and wade in its depths. If it’ll flood come summer, when the storms roll through. If Warm will let him see him like this there, too, in more secluded places, under bends of willows and live oak.

              Warm goes under again and comes up, rubbing his eyes clear, and then makes his way to a boulder that rises up out of the current, a long, flat surface perfect for lying on, which, Morris knows, is what Warm intends to do. The sleeves of his underwear dangle from his hips and he ties them prudently around his waist and lies back on the hot stone, hands folded neatly on his stomach, eyes closed.

              Morris follows; there is enough room on the rock for the both of them. He wishes now that he’d kept his own clothes on, or at least some of them, but it’s too late now, and there is no point rushing back into trousers and shirtsleeves when he’s soaked through like he is. So he climbs up on the rock next to Warm and lies down beside him, nestling his skull into a groove in the stone, and closes his eyes, too, hearing Warm’s slow breathing just under the noise of the current below them.

              For a little while, they rest there, and Morris feels the sunlight moving across his cold wet skin in a million individual pinpricks, like a stream of caterpillars migrating across him. He smells wet stone and the occasional waft of evergreen from up above, and Warm’s arm very close to his is—well—warm.

              Morris opens his eyes and is immediately blinded by the brilliant blue sky, so he closes them again, watching colors swirl and dance across his eyelids, and Warm accidentally touches his leg with his foot as he rearranges himself more comfortably, and Morris thinks again about how different things would have been, had he stayed in Jacksonville—had he lingered outside the shed to watch the brothers rip Hermann Kermit Warm apart.

              He needs to stop. There is no point in dwelling on something so horrible, especially when it never happened. Focus instead on right now, and what is good about it. He’s clean and refreshed, warm and pleasantly tired, and very, very grateful to himself, that he decided to up and follow this man at the end of it.

              “Penny for your thoughts, John?” Warm says, unexpectedly, from beside him, and Morris holds a hand up over his eyes before he opens them again, to shield them from the light.

              For a moment, he watches the thin clouds go by overhead, a red-tailed hawk swoop in and out of sight. A cloud of gnats is hovering way up above them, almost invisible, just implied motion. He feels Warm stretching an arm up next to him to rest above his head, hears the faint cracking of his toes as he flexes them against the rock. There is no one in the world Morris would rather be with, he thinks, no amount of money or adventure or endless, untold solitude that could tempt him to get up off this rock right now and walk away.

              “I’m thinking that I want to kiss you very badly,” Morris says, “and I am considering how best to ask your permission.”

              He hears Warm turn his head against the stone, and takes a beat before he turns his head, too.

              His expression hasn’t changed—his eyes are big and open, his brow unfurrowed. As if Morris has merely dictated to him the weather, or asked what he wanted to eat for supper.

              “You want to kiss me?”

              “Yes.”

              “You think you need my permission?” There is humor in Warm’s voice, gentle. He sounds fond, and he is smiling very slightly. He has not broken Morris’ gaze. They are very close together.

              “Well,” Morris says, “I think it would be rude of me not to ask.”

              Warm laughs, very small, in his throat. “You may kiss me, John Morris, if you like,” he says, with gravitas and formality, and Morris has to laugh at that, too, before he gathers his courage and closes the minute distance between them and presses his lips to Warm’s. And after a little while, ten seconds, perhaps, he pulls away, and Warm is smiling at him beatifically, a hint of color rising in his face.

              For a moment, Warm reaches over to cup Morris’ cheek in his palm, and then takes it away again, and with his smile still fixed on his face he resumes his position on the stone, his face upturned toward the sun, his fingers folded on his stomach, and Morris lays a hand on his arm and they stay like that, not speaking, until the afternoon has baked them dry.

 

* * *

 

 

              They are not talking about it, because there is no reason to talk about it, and after a meal of hardtack and dried beef Warm goes about inventorying their equipment and occasionally handing something to Morris that needs to be bent back or fixed in some way, and Morris makes a tidy pile of it all, buckets to mend and a sieve to patch, two of his own shirts that need holes sewn up, a pair of Warm’s socks that need darning, pans to be hammered back into shape.

              He picks up his stream of chatter again, and Morris is content to listen as they take their separate seats around the dead firepit, where Warm begins to sew up a split in one of Morris’ shirts and Morris wrestles a nail out of the warped corner of a sluice box, holds it between his teeth while he searches for another one. If there is a plot to what Warm is saying, they both lost it long ago; it’s a ramble of disconnected thoughts; he is talking one minute about quilts and the next about tilling, jumping blindly from the particular chemistry of his formula to his European friends in Texas back to chemistry, and then, bizarrely, to astronomy, until he is back to chemistry again, and Morris has learned by now not to try too hard to decipher what Warm is getting at—it is much easier, more soothing and more comfortable, to simply nod along, to offer a response when it is asked for, to try and glean the importance in whatever he is saying, and to roll through the sound of his voice with him. He could listen to Warm talk forever, about nothing at all, and be content with it.

Someday when they are calm and settled and Warm has learned to slow down he will be able to teach Morris so many things, about science and art and literature, and Morris can show him what he knows of nature, birds and plants and rocks—right now all there is is the river and its gold but there is so much more, so much country and so much time to explore it in, the two of them. Morris and Warm, Warm and Morris, MW.

              “I’m talking too much,” says Warm, with a self-defeating chuckle, and he catches Morris smiling at him.

              “No,” says Morris simply, “you aren’t,” and goes back to the task in his hands.

 

 

* * *

 

              _Our work is finished,_ Morris writes, by the light of the newly-stoked fire, later, long after dark, _and tomorrow night we will put Hermann’s formula to the test and see what we can find in the river. There is gold here—he has already confirmed it—now it is a matter of the science working in our favor. I can think of no more pleasant partner to do hard work with. The labor we do is difficult, but he never shirks it; when we are working, he never complains; and if he complains it is with a smile. I find myself thinking often about holding him close to me._

Warm is keeping careful watch over their supper in the cast-iron, the fire curling and dancing over his face, lighting up his eyes. He has gone quiet again, back into another of his thoughtful valleys where Morris is happy to meet him in silence. The only sound is the flesh of the squirrels Morris had shot earlier sizzling in the pan, the crackling of the wood in the fire.

              _We are of the same mind on so many things. I hope he does not mistake my affection for manipulation. I hope we are past that now, as a unit. I am hard pressed to remember a person for whom I have ever cared so deeply, and though it is a novel feeling it is not unwelcome._

They eat with only murmurs of conversation, mundane in nature, and Morris cannot stop looking at Warm across the fire, at the fine and handsome angles of his face and his long eyelashes and the two pinpoint moles above his left eyebrow.

_I could not say what draws me to him, and perhaps that is not a bad thing. There should be some mystery in the universe._

His journal has been closed for a half hour and he has been gazing into the fire, calm in their shared stillness, when Warm gets up from where he has been lying across one of their logs and quietly rounds the fire and holds his hand out to Morris.

Morris looks up, looks at it; Warm meets his eyes for just a moment, and then casts his gaze down toward his feet, swallows self-consciously.

Morris understands, and takes his hand, and stands up.

Warm leads him away from the fire toward his tent; there is a lantern lit inside, and it casts the canvas in an orange glow. Past the trees their horses shuffle and nicker softly. They duck inside and Warm pulls the flap closed, ties its loose canvas to the tent-pole.

He unclasps his suspenders and begins to unbutton his shirt, and Morris follows his cue a moment later. Together without speaking they undress by the lanternlight, their clothes falling in soft heaps onto the tattered, worn-through horse blanket that serves as a rug in Warm’s tent, and Morris watches Warm reach down to peel off his socks and stand barefoot in the dirt in front of him.

It is not like being naked in the river; it is something else entirely, and Morris doesn’t know what to make of it except that he is relieved it is finally happening. Warm is looking at him, at all of him, and Morris imagines that Warm can see him atomically, in all his individual molecular parts, exposed and vulnerable, no longer a human body but the conglomeration of elements and soul. He imagines that Warm can see the gentle beating light of his pulsing heart in his chest and he imagines that Warm knows what it is.

              How lovely he is, in this exact light, a foot or less away from him, his head stooped under the angle of the tent.

              “I feel,” says Morris, very softly, “that you are some part of myself that I lost once, and you’ve come back to me after a very long time.”

              Warm smiles broadly, and Morris feels a strange and delightful heat melting down the inside of his chest and flooding down into his feet. He wants to touch Warm, pull him in close until all their skin is touching and he can press his lips to the crown of his head. He steps forward, but Warm moves first, reaching down to tangle their fingers together and kiss Morris’ throat, at the place where it meets his shoulder, and Morris closes his eyes, leans down into it, squeezes Warm’s hand in his. They stand like that, bodies nearly in contact, and Morris feels brave enough to lay a hand on Warm’s hip and draw him in a little closer, and Warm rests his face in the crook of Morris’ shoulder where he’d kissed him a moment before, and that is all there is. Swaying occasionally on the uneven ground, skin brushing, unextraordinary—their fingers locked and twisted together—Morris’ lips on Warm’s forehead where his hair smells of smoke, and Warm’s free hand laid gentle and unassuming on Morris’ chest—just above his heart—where it beats.

 

* * *

 

 

_I am happy when I am near him,_ Morris writes. _I am happy that I feel this way, that we are together. It is hard to feel like a member of the living race without ever having loved anyone; perhaps now I can get on with it._

 

* * *

 

 

In the morning, under a new pink sky busy swallowing up stars, Morris goes down to the dam with his tin mug of coffee in hand, balances unsteadily across it until he reaches the near-middle, and lowers himself carefully down onto it. Overhead the day is stretching its fingers out over California, toward the sea, peeling back the nighttime. Up on the bluff, Warm is busy making himself awake in his tent.

Morris takes a deep breath, pausing for a moment to reflect on where he is, what he feels—the cool morning breeze chasing around his throat and collarbone, and the smooth stone underneath him, and the gentle murmur of the water down even further below. He can feel daytime warmth, still distant, but coming in like a rolling storm, rumbling inevitably forward. He likes to do this, when he has the chance, to anchor himself for a few minutes, and understand precisely who and what John Morris will be today.

Today, he thinks, he will be happy.  He cannot remember the last time he made that decision with full intent to follow through. And why shouldn’t he be? Here, whether he knows it consciously or not, he thinks, he has everything he needs: food and shelter and company, a set of tasks to occupy his time, a reward waiting at the end of it. Tonight they’ll prospect. In the meantime he knows there is cooking to be done and preparations to be made and conversations to be had, and all of these things will be good and make him happy; he knows it.

He hears a skittering of pebbles and looks up, setting his coffee on the dam beside him and crossing his ankles high above the water. Warm is moving carefully down the slope, his own tin cup in hand, coming down to meet him.

 

* * *

 

 

Warm is making last-minute calculations in his cramped, hurried handwriting in the margins of one of his books, and Morris is making lunch—flapjacks, more dried beef, and canned peaches, for the occasion—and he decides to ask; after what they shared last night, there is no reason to be coy about it.

“Have you ever been with a man before?” he asks, and Warm glances up, then back down, pausing to lick the tip of his pencil and go back to writing.

“No,” he says. “Have you?”

“No.” Morris nudges one of the billowing flapjacks with his knife. “I’ve hardly been with anyone.”

“Well, you’re beating me in that respect.” Warm dog-ears his page and sets his book aside, watching Morris cook. “I hope I didn’t—disappoint?”

Morris scoffs, and Warm grins, his face wavering behind the rising steam from the skillet.

Together they watch the batter sizzling in the pan, and Morris flips the flapjack carefully. It’s burnt on one side; he’ll take that one for himself.

“It’s an effect of wilderness,” Morris says eventually.

“What is?”

He gestures aimlessly with his knife. “I’ve found—I’ve found there’s a certain kind of intimacy, out here. You don’t find it with other people anywhere else.” He doesn’t know how to explain what he really means, which is that last night was strange and lovely, and like nothing else he’d ever done in his life, and that he doesn’t wants to lose hold of it.

Warm hums a contemplative note. “I think I like that,” he says. He tears off a piece of beef with his teeth and chews in silence, as if rolling it over in his head.

Morris doesn’t add that he hopes it lasts—it occurs to him that this is a ridiculous thing to say. Of course it will. He’s certain of it. He doles out the less-burned flapjacks into Warm’s tin plate and then takes the rest for himself, and watches while Warm peels open the can of peaches and divvies them up, glistening sweet in golden syrup. They touch forks in a stupid stand-in for a toast and snort quiet laughter at each other and Morris tries to recall exactly when the change had come, for him. Not love at first sight, certainly, but—love at first doubt—the moment he’d realized, on the trail, even before Jacksonville, that to betray Warm would be to hurt himself irreparably. Having never fallen in love before, Morris doesn’t know whether or not this is normal, for it to happen so quickly, and to be so certain of it that he’d swear to anyone that they would remain together for the rest of their lives. There is no doubt in his mind, and he knows, without knowing why he knows, that Warm is thinking the same thing.

Warm catches him looking, and smiles at him, and Morris smiles back.  

It’s a rare thing to meet a person in this world who truly matters in every way, Morris thinks. He savors a forkful of peach. He’ll have to write that down later.

 

* * *

 

 

              Warm is nervous, and he’s retreated from anxious chit-chat into silence. Morris wants to reassure him, to tell him what he’s sure of—that his chemical will work, that it’ll be magnificent, genius—but he doesn’t think it will help; for all his confidence, Warm is still a scientist in the early stages of experiment. It would be unwise, Morris thinks, to fill his head with anything besides the task at hand, for fear of making the nerves worse.

              So he thinks about Dallas, in his own silence, as they begin their work in the last hour of sunlight—carrying the massive, sloshing barrel of Warm’s formula down the treacherous slope; building a fire in the sand upstream of the dam, where the current is pooling and catching and curling on itself like something sinuous and alive; bringing down buckets, pans, canvas, rope, a hammer, anything Warm picks up with his fidgeting hands that might be remotely useful. Morris, quietly, brings the little bottle of brandy he’d picked up before they left Mayfield, in case Warm needs some liquid courage come the nightfall.

              He thinks about Dallas while Warm paces in circles around the fire, accounting for things and muttering about ratios under his breath, making rambling lists in a voice too low to hear. He’s not needed yet, so he sits on a shattered piece of driftwood and watches the sun sink to the west, and thinks about their house—and how it will smell, and how the light will fall in its two rooms separated by their breezeway; if they’ll build it facing east, to catch the dawn, or south, to brace better against the cold winter winds. He has begun to privately allow himself to daydream, and it serves now as a good distraction against the possibility that their venture might fail—that the dam might give—that the gold won’t be there—that the men they are running from will appear on the ridge in the moonlight. Better to think about pitchers and blankets. Fences. Wells. He watches Warm anxiously tugging on his moustache and tries to picture him as he’d been the night before—soft, relaxed, sure of his footing. Will he be like that, in Dallas, in those quiet rooms they’ll build, by candlelight, on cold mornings? Morris hopes so.

              There is an hour or more yet until the sky is dark enough for the formula to work, and Warm needs to be left alone to get himself together, so Morris finds a comfortable hollow under the cliff and dozes with his hat held precariously over his face, and dreams fitfully about the house, and standing in the right-most room, watching Warm making bread on a table in the left-most—a lazing bird-dog on the breezeway—the huge, swelling noise of cicadas in the fields, and Warm’s fists kneading and rolling the dough, and just outside the doorway the figures of two men with guns on their hips.

              He’s grateful when Warm says his name and brings him out of it, back into the ecstatically silent twilight, where they are alone in the canyon. They take off their boots, their socks, and roll up their trousers beneath the knee.

              The smell of Warm’s chemical is like nothing Morris has ever encountered before—something like ammonia, but sharper, deeper, and he can feel it stripping the insides of his nostrils raw, and Warm’s eyes are full of tears brought on by the fumes. Delicately they pour it into buckets, careful not to splash it, or get any on their skin; it’s dark brown and grainy, with the consistency of congealing molasses, and though Morris has heard the process described to him a dozen times he cannot imagine this stuff doing anything in the river other than settling, a sludge, to the bottom, suffocating whatever unfortunate creatures are down there. But he trusts Warm. He trusts the mystery in Warm’s universe.

              The fumes are getting to Warm more than they are getting to him, and Morris fishes out his handkerchief from his pocket, passes it over. Warm casts him a grateful look and holds it over his nose and mouth. He breathes through it, breathes what must be Morris’ particular smell, closing his eyes, and Morris stands politely by with his bucket until Warm seems to have steadied a little bit. He watches Warm’s hand crumple the handkerchief and stuff it into his own pocket, and he doesn’t mind at all.

              “Nothing for it but to do it,” Morris says, “eh?” He claps a hand on Warm’s shoulder, and Warm smiles at him anxiously, but seems like he’s rallying, standing up a little straighter, holding his bucket in both hands.

              “Alright,” Warm says, clearing his throat. He coughs once. “Once the formula is in the water—it’ll take a moment for it to work. But when it does we should be able to see the gold very clearly. Reach in and pick it up. That’s all.”

              _That’s all._ He is talking about picking gold out of the water like someone picking apples in the autumn. Sometimes Morris is sure that Warm doesn’t grasp his own intelligence. He talks about his work and his ideas with all the vague, unhurried confidence and curiosity of an aristocratic amateur naturalist, a rich young climber who summers in the Dolomites, but Morris knows Warm is deeper than that.

              He follows Warm’s lead, and together they empty their buckets just offshore, a little upstream from the dam. The water tempers the fumes somewhat, thank God, and when they are through Morris and Warm step back onto the sand in their bare feet to wait.

              It’s full dark now, with a sliver of moon overhead.

              They don’t dare speak, as if it’ll disturb the magic. Morris fixes his eyes on the water in the gloom. A soft breeze from upstream against his face, his throat. Night bugs singing in the trees. Distantly, the gentle snap of twigs where the horses and the donkeys are shuffling in the underbrush. The river is still black and unchanged.

He looks harder. Maybe the glow is too dim to see immediately. Whatever heat was in the sand is being leached out quickly by the nighttime and his toes are sinking into it, his heels too. Warm has reached over and taken his hand and is squeezing it very, very tightly. Morris closes his eyes and then opens them again—maybe they haven’t adjusted to the dark yet. Still nothing—the anticipation he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying is slowly lowering in him. His heart is beginning to sink. It’s been three minutes now. Maybe five. Maybe it won’t work. He squeezes Warm’s hand back. His skin is tough and dirty and his grip is astonishingly strong.

              Maybe it won’t work. He doesn’t want to look at Warm for fear of seeing him realize it, too. He looks instead down at his feet, almost laughably ghost-white next to Warm’s in the dark.

              “Hermann,” he begins, but Warm says, “John.”

              Morris looks up, and sees that Warm is pointing, out into the middle of the river.

              A handful of times, on only the very clearest and most moonless nights in the high parts of the desert, Morris has seen the Milky Way from the top of a ridge or a mesa, like a stream of starry clouds exhaled across the sky, and this reminds him of that more than anything else. Faint greens and blues and coppery yellows appearing, rising to the surface in gusts and congealing in inky formations, lagging in the current, and then sinking, settling, spreading in loose, colorful tendrils. The colors meet and then diverge, cluster and curl. Warm has not let go of his hand. They are growing brighter by the second, more vibrant, greener, and now Morris sees the colors coalescing, streaming out and into swirling, self-contained galaxies that remain in place, only shifted very slightly by the current and glowing proudly over what Morris can only assume is _gold._

He’s too stunned to move—he’d been sure it would work, but wasn’t prepared for it to work so brilliantly—but Warm moves next to him, and then releases his viselike grip on Morris’ hand and goes, rapidly and joyously, splashing into the water, reaching down, and picking up a gleaming nugget of gold the size of a quail’s egg. His face breaks into a grin bigger than Morris has ever seen, and then he throws his head back and crows a shout of pure glee, shuddery with all his pent-up anxiety and relief, his arms thrown up with the gold clutched tight in his right hand.

              Morris hears himself wheezing an incredulous laugh, and then he has the presence of mind to look down at his feet again, where the water runs just an inch or so away, where, beneath its surface, the sand itself is a universe of pinpricks of light—gold dust—gold dust in the sand, stretching as far as he can see down to the dam, lit up all the way down to the place where the riverbed becomes stone and shale, where pieces the sizes of peas and grapes and pennies and fingernails litter the mud, almost comical in their abundance. He feels hysterical and winded. He stares, and keeps staring, as Warm is wading noisily through the current, unearthing pieces of gold with one hand from the sucking mud and tumbled slate that would have taken an ordinary prospector days to find.

              Warm is laughing, the way a child on Christmas morning might laugh, and Morris sinks to his haunches, overwhelmed. He knows he needs to get in there and help, snatch up as much as he can before the light dies away, but he can hardly believe it—that Warm was right all along; that they are going to be rich, and that somewhere they are going to build a homestead with this gold, in Warm’s fabled place where all men are equal.

              Morris makes a shovel of his two hands and sinks them into the glowing sand and raises a cupful of glimmering water up toward his face.

              “John,” Warm calls, out of breath, giddy, “John, we’ve done it.”

              Little specks of starlight floating in the chalice of his upturned palms. Two handfuls of dust could buy them new horses and tack. A bucketful could buy a covered wagon and a month’s provisions, a tick mattress and a down quilt. They’ll strike out east with this. They’ll break trail across the deserts and foothills and canyons and mountains, making camp in arroyos, sleeping under those massive stars, unhurried and unmolested by anyone, and in Texas—in Texas this gold will buy them a life, a company, a community, a legacy, anything they want, anything they can think of. Morris and Warm, Warm and Morris, WM, for always. _Imagine._ His throat feels stopped full. He cannot believe his luck.

              “John,” Warm says again, not a call this time but just the word. His voice is softer, fascinated. He comes to a stop in the middle of the river, water up to his thighs, and Morris finally looks up from his handful of stars.

              Warm’s hands are full of gold, though the glow is slowly leaving them. He isn’t looking at Morris, or at the river floor. He’s facing southeast, catching his breath.

              There is nothing out that way but the mountain, and more mountains beyond it. And then flat scrubland and the slow, encroaching white desert, and the searing high mesas and the Guadalupe peaks. Out that way is Dallas.

              Morris’ hands are beginning to itch.

              Out that way is Dallas, where the gold will take them, together. A two-room house with a corridor in between—one room for sleeping and one for business. A dirt track leading off, and the Trinity tributaries not too far away, and the live oaks and the bird-dog, and a perfect quiet, and places they can kiss one another, and touch one another, and laugh and talk with one another, out there in Dallas, every season of the year, forever, for always in those fields of tender light.

 

                           

             

             

             


End file.
